I updated Alone In Space to fix two game breaking bugs.

1. Fixed the crash that happened when you pushed Play.

2. Fixed the crash that gave the (Cannot set multisample rendertarget as texture)

Changelog:

– Changed Nebulas to a pre-rendered version was the cause of major lag on some systems (Fixed the crash on Play error)

– Changed the Minimap to no longer draw enemy ships of any kind was the cause of the (Cannot set multisample rendertarget as texture) error

Inside of the download there is Alone.exe (the fixed version) and Alone-org.exe (the original version)

You can download/Rate the game here.

…But I managed to finish it, and seems to play pretty well.

Quite a weekend! I was pleased to get a good night’s sleep last night.

I had fun, was a great experience trying to code a game from scratch in 48 hours. You definitely have to keep your discipline; I worked right up to the deadline, and did an all-nighter the second day. I think I did overscope a little, so had very little time for playtesting or polish. (or being able to improve on my placeholder art!)

My game is a turn-based strategy RPG. Very similar to the “Shining Force” series of games, but there’s no ‘force’; it’s just you, on your own.

Here’s my entry page:

• http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7345

And here’s a direct link to play the game in your browser:

• http://www.gavpugh.com/ludumdare/ld22/WebPlayer.html

I recorded a timelapse video, kept a journal, and will writeup a postmortem too. I’ll post them all here, once they’re ready.

Cheers!

This has been my first Ludum Dare entry (and probably the first game I’ve actually “released” beyond just having the code available).  I decided to make something multiplayer,with the tie to the theme being that it wouldn’t be apparent whether or not anyone else is actually playing, or even that the game is multiplayer at all.  Beyond that I’m a fan of the Box2D physics engine and know it reasonably well now, so I decided to work with that to create an online multiplayer arcadey shooter.

I’ve been interested in making realtime multiplayer games in “html5” for a while now, and have tried a couple times in the past.  Previously the implementations of websockets and other newer web standards hadn’t been mature enough.  Websockets are now in an RFC (supported in Chrome, not quite in Firefox), there’s some preliminary support for sound effects and there’s support for encoding and decoding of binary data packets.

I have been very much treating this competition as a chance to try out some new technologies as well as trying to produce a working game.  A large part of the first day was taken up setting up a cherrypy/ws4py server which would work with Chrome, most of the rest of the day was spent figuring out javascript websocket handling and binary data decoding.  The actual gameplay elements didn’t take up that much time in total.   By the end of the day I’d got most of what’s ended up as the game done with it being a simple multi-player shooter.

The second day I didn’t have as much time as the first and things seemed to go a bit slower.  A lot of the time was spent on various bug fixes.   I made some graphical improvements like adding the background, added a some sounds (which took a while digging up useful information on the webkit audio api) and added NPC dots.

I think what I’ve ended up with is more of a tech demo for features of HTML5 than an excellent game, though it has some features I like.  There’s a few larger bugs in there which I’ll probably leave in for now.  I don’t think I’ll carry on work with this beyond the competition, though I’ll probably extract some of the code from it into a library that I can use for other games down the line.

‘malone? is submitted here, please rate and drop me some feedback.

So I’m rating the games and keeping note of the ones that I think “stand out” from the rest, after all, 750+ is a lot of games…

I’m keeping the list in a post in my blog, click here!

I’ll update at least once a day!

Okay, well. This is awkward. My game was literally on the verge of being done when it broke. Just completely and utterly broke. I spent hoursd trying to find why, but to no avail. So, it appears I did make SOMETHING, since that WAS my goal, but it’s in a barely playable condition. And, fittingly, my game’s title was called Broken. Well, it was fun, I suppose. Here’s what went right and what didn’t.

What went Right

Good theme- I’m really good at atmosphiric-y stuff, so I knew this was the perfect theme. I had a good (but short) plotline and storyboard planned out perfectly. Unfortunately, things sortof went downhil from there.

What went Wrong

Poor Planning- Yeah, I didn’t plan well.  Let’s be honest. I only somewhat knew my tools. And somewhat knowing your tools isn’t going to make you a game. Granted, it will make you a game, but maybe not one you’re proud of.

It’s not a feature, it’s a game breaking bug- Yes, the bugs were definately game breaking for me. Since I only somewhat knew my tools, I couldn’t diagnose what was going wrong and as a result spent many countless hours trying to fix it. (About half the time I was awake.)

Life- The biggest thing that got me was life. Even though I entered in the Jam, everything fell apart on the last day (today.) From finding out my game spazzes out every time you switch scenes, to having to spend 3 hours not diagnosing your game, to even spending 12+ hours trying to diagnose your game, nothing went well. At all.

I hope you all learned a lesson from me. Every wrong thing stemed from poor planning. Nothing went well. If you don’t learn anything, atleast remember this: Planning is EVERYTHING.

That said, I’m already prepping for LD 23. Good job everyone who participated (and those who still are) and holycrapwebroke700.

This was my first entry, and boy was it a crazy experience. Next time I will definitely create something simpler, and alot less focued on the nice shaders. I did a timelapse for some time, but then I just debunked it because I wasn’t getting much done during “streaming hours.” I have come to learn alot about game design in general, but more importantly what and what not to do during crunch time. Time for analysis!!

The Game Itself:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50008295/WebPlayer.html

The game itself is pretty basic, a 2d platformer where you maneuver a guy through a set of rooms. Not original in the slightest, but I wasted enough time on crazy ideas. Performance wise it ate up alot of draw calls (I had no time for serious optimization) and the WebPlayer seems a little shaky because of it. I think the graphics are nice and fit quite well. Not really a whole lot of fun, besides walking around you try to push some crates around to solve some sort of puzzle. As for theme, I actually tried to cook up something good. The lighting, sounds, and layout were all part of some creepy-alone atmosphere. Of course, it is a 48 hour game experiment and I couldn’t put as much time as I wanted into it.

The Problems (many)

-Why is my game so damn short?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     This was simply due to not enough time. The level was made on the spot in Sauerbraten, ( an FPS game). I had to play it safe because I didn’t know, for example, how far the player could jump while creating it within the FPS game. I couldn’t keep exporting, so the level design, in an attempt to be puzzlish, is just downright annoying and sloppy.–

Why are my walls all Glitchy?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            -Although I came up with a good solution for collisions, I blame it all on sauerbraten. Each material represented a different surface type, and missing a surface in sauerbraten meant glitchy walls. It’s hard to explain, really. The controller is fairly decent, it uses realistic physics and the controls are tight, while mantaining a pseudo-realism feel. But alas, poor level design just ruins it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 –

Um……Y u give us no controls?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Well, I wanted you to feel like you were really alone, with no guidance to help you. Apparently, most people can’t even get past the first room! (why don’t you go challenge yourself now? 😉  )                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 laglaglaglag                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              poor optimization, sorry guys.

What I learned:

DO NOT RELY ON CLEVER LEVEL DESIGN  :  Your level will get nowhere and it will be extremely short much like mine. I cannot stress this enough, I didn’t believe it at first. Also, don’t rely on 3rd party games to do your dirty work.

BE ORIGINAL/SILLY/WEIRD. DONT TAKE YOUR GAME SERIOUS:  Why do I say this? in an attempt to make a serious (hears laughing) story based platformer, I ended up with a barely playable graphics prototype. I would much rather tenderize chicken upside down while tenderizing my shoelace than 30 seconds of pointless rooms.

X FACTOR:  My game lacked this as well. What will make your game stand out? is it original? Clearly, this is what makes the 48 hour game fun to play with the limited time.

GRAPHICS? DEPENDS WHAT YOUR GOING FOR  :  Everyone likes nice graphics, just remember, they eat up alot of time.

——Conclusion——

I really enjoyed the Ludum dare, although I was quite stressed at times. I really need to make my game more user friendly. Even more importantly, next time I will take my time and simplify everything.  I will just get the basis of my entire game as simple as possible, and If I have time, then I’ll add cool features.

TehWut out!

Now that I’ve slept, I think I’m ready to think about what worked and what didn’t. But You Wake Alone has basically the same gameplay that I imagined in the beginning but had another layer of visual craziness and meaningful text that was a surprise. It even had sound and music, which went a lot faster than I expected!

On a personal level, it was very satisfying. I had a lot of prior obligations (including sleep!) so I figure that I spent 24 hours actually working. That’s basically a week’s worth of work condensed into two days! Getting instant feedback from my coworkers was very motivating, as was the #LD48 Twitter feed. Any time I started flagging I looked at those comments and got pumped up! I also ate better than I thought I might, which helped me maintain concentration until… oh… two hours before the deadline.

What Went Well

Scope
My concept turned out to be almost exactly the right length. I had a couple of features that got cut (an actual win condition and a new type of crowd) but I also managed to get some things in that I hadn’t planned on (sound and music). The only time I felt rushed was Sunday evening when I was trying desperately to get the win condition in the last hour.

Adding story
The original version was totally visual, which was okay since the style turned out to be so striking (maybe not good, but at least interesting). Adding some brief snippets of text really improved the game, though. For one, it was a lot faster to add more textual content than more graphics. It also helped people give their own context to the game, especially the more writerly folks.

Stealing from the past
I made good use of concepts that I’ve become familiar with in my day-job games. For example, the maze generation is a simple implementation of an algorithm that I ran across when working on Tiger Trackers (my current game). The crazy level overlays are based on code that my coworker and I wrote to deal with scaling a Flash movie clip around a non-origin point. By pulling in concepts that I knew inside and out, I was able to spend more time playing with the fun stuff and less time getting the basics working, despite not using an engine.

Simple collision detection
A lot of people had trouble with collision detection. It’s always a hard problem and if you don’t get it exactly right, you get weird edge-case bugs that are hard to replicate and fix. Early on, I decided arbitrarily to work on a grid, which made collision detection super easy. Whenever an actor moves, it checks to see if it’s moving into a new grid. If it is, it checks to see if there’s a wall in the way and stops the movement if necessary. This means that no matter how many pixels an actor jumps, it can NEVER skip over a wall, so major collision glitches can’t happen. I still had some minor problems, especially when I changed the origin on my actors, but they were never game-breakers and they were relatively easy to resolve.

What Went Wrong

Rushing a feature
I knew that adding a win condition was going to be a big deal, but it was such a cool idea that I had to try and cram it in at the last minute. Instead of trying to cram a big feature into the last hour, I should have gone out with a bang and just submitted early to avoid the stress.

Losing the fun
I wasted about two hours on Saturday pushing the zooming aspect further and further into the gameplay. I don’t regret playing around with different concepts (that’s what this is all about, right?) but I shouldn’t have settled on zooming for so long once it became obvious that zooming was less fun than seeing more of the screen.

Crazy input handling
I have no idea what I was thinking when I started writing my keyboard handling code. My recent day-job games have all been mouse controlled, so I just kind of started doing what seemed to make sense when it came to keyboard input this time. Unfortunately, that led to problems and bandaids over those problems and then bandaids on top of those bandaids. In the end, keypresses go into an array and then get removed from arrays and those arrays get converted into horizontal and vertical directions later and blah blah three steps later you’re actually moving. Madness!

Conclusion

Positive outweighs the negative 4-3, so I think I did pretty well. I certainly had a lot of fun and learned a lot!

You can play But You Wake Alone here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8239. I’d love to get feedback, so please leave comments!

And now off to rate some other games! Leave a comment to bring yours to my attention!

Yeah, that awful, awful feeling of having eaten bad food hit me on Sunday, and I had to give up. Despite that, I still have a timelapse video of what I did manage to accomplish up here. If you want to play the incredibly crappy techdemo, you can do that here, but be warned: it’s crappy.

Tags: timelapse

Weeeee

Tags: timelapse

We have alot of the stuff done. luckily for game maker it has a very easy level design tool. Should be done soon.

again, heres a demo. if anyone cares.

http://www.mediafire.com/?25vgy7dquqy42sx

First, link to this game:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7264

Then, a screen:

This night i went to sleep at 3am, i woke at 5:30 and went to work (i start at 7am), my head hurts a lot and i feel i need more than two hours of sleep tonight. I played my game a couple times again and this is my post mortem:

The Good

A complete game: the game had everything. Start Menu, Game Intro, Actual Game, Game Ending.
Graphics: My Achille’s heel, i don’t know how, i don’t know why, but i found a graphical style and i made a couple simple animations. Achieving this gave me enough satisfaction.
Sound: I’m really happy about the game sounds. Bfxr was a good choice and this music generator completed the work.
My first Ludum Dare: Since I found out about Ludum Dare in 2009, I always wanted to participate in this competition, and this was my first entry. I really enjoyed it!

The Bad

Crap story: The story intro/ending were made in the last 3 hours, i never thought about them till the very last and i wrote some cheap texts.
The game is too short: There’s only one level, it’s kinda boring and it can be finished in less than one minute and a half.
Tools: My Unity3D and C# knowledges are low, i started toying them about a couple month ago. I got struck a lot of time trying to figure out how to progress (eg 2+ hours for jetpack physics).
Bad programming techniques: Using copy-paste between objects and spaghetti antipattern is usually a bad thing, trough i think it may be ok for fast developement. I wrote really few comments on my code, which is always a bad thing.
Timing: I had other things to do in this weekend, I stopped once in a while to eat and I slept enough during the first day. I managed to work 20-22 hours and submit my entry ten minutes before compo end, but probably that’s was only luck. Having added at least one or two level and a boss fight could have improved my game a bit.

And last but not the least, my timelapse:

Tags: postmortem, timelapse, unity, unity3d

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7456

This was my first Ludum Dare and I must say that I enjoyed every moment of it. I rarely see my projects through to the end so having a time limit and some competition was very useful for motivation.

What went right?

• Time. I had plenty of time to work on this game, an empty house and no plans for the weekend meant that I could dedicate every moment I was awake/not eating to working on the game.
• Pre-planning. I planned every aspect of the game on paper and planned out exactly what order I was make everything in before I wrote a single line of code. Not a single feature in the final version wasn’t planned on paper first, a lot of features from my original plans were removed though.
• Knowledge. Every feature in my game had been made at some point or another, in some form or another, by me. The problem was trying to remember how I made them and then put them all together into a game that actually works.
• Notch. That man’s livestream had some great music. Plus, the rhythmic tapping of his keyboard was great motivation to keep typing.
• Gameplay. The idea was that my game would be hard. I wanted people to feel under pressure while they were trying to disarm the bombs, I thought that the time-limit, lack of a reset button and having to start the game from the beginning if they failed was a good way of achieving this. Plus, if no one can finish the game, no one can complain that it’s too short.

What went wrong?

• Gameplay. Apparently players don’t like to be infuriated by high difficulty levels and over-the-top punishments for making just one mistake, who knew?
• Over-estimation of my programming speed. A lot of stuff from the original plans were never in the final game, this is purely because I didn’t realize just how long it takes me to code even the most basic of features.
• Lockpicking. As a result of not having the foresight to realize how long these features would take to add, lockpicking wasn’t started until a few hours before the deadline. This resulted in lockpicking turning from the Tetris style puzzle that it was originally supposed to be and becoming a “Bash the buttons as fast as you can” minigame with awful graphics. It also meant that the option to place a previously disarmed bomb in the lock to explode it open, had to be cut completely.

Conclusion:
Overall, I’ve learned that difficulty is not a good substitute for longevity and that believing my programming skills to be god-like is never a good idea, especially before I attempt to make something against the clock and something that other people will play.

Tags: LD22, post-mortem, postmortem

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 6:35 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I made a game for the jam, I cant seem to submit it! its a flash game, swf format, what should I do?

Tags: flash help game jam

Hell Yeah!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5454

This time I made a much much bigger game than in September. A big map, some objects and characters, 3 endings, many animations and models, it was a very hectic week-end.

I’m already very happy that I succeed to do a lot more in the same timeframe.

As for the game itself, it’s now your turn to figure it out. Getting to one of the endings is only up to you. I hope you will like it and get all 3

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=8158

After learning about Ludum Dare–somewhat ironically–48 hours before it began, I decided it was something that I just had to give a shot. It has easily been simultaneously one of the most fun and most stressful programming projects I have taken on in a while.

Before It Began

 I don’t think I had any idea what I was truly getting myself into. I knew it was going to be a challenge. I knew it was going to be hell. But I didn’t quite understand the nature of the beast.

It was at this point, before the compo began, that I made the stupidest mistake of all. I decided to make a game using technologies that I had never even touched.

I had seen a few examples of WebGL online before and was blown away. Full 3D from a browser? This is the future of the internet.

The problem though is that I had never touched WebGL. I had never even successfully dabbled in OpenGL. Every time I tried to find a working tutorial, there was always some bullshit reason that the code would refuse to run. The closest thing I had to any sort of 3D graphics knowledge was the work I had done with Unity3D for college, and a few painfully simple Direct3D projects that really never got out of the “3D tech powering a 2D engine” sort of thing.

Deciding I was going to do this was the programming equivalent to deciding it was a brilliant idea to saw off one of my legs before participating in a race.

The Theme

When the competition began, I–like many others, I’m sure–was completely caught off guard by the theme. Alone. Out of all the themes people could have voted for, Alone came out on top. I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but it was a theme I never expected to be selected. As such, the first two hours or so were spent pacing around the room–it helps me think, honestly–trying to ponder this strange theme.

First my mind went to shadows. Maybe you could be someone who wishes they had friends, and interacted with your shadow to complete puzzles in some sort of platformer? From there, my mind pondered more about the darkness of it all. Everything around you is dark… space? That’s kinda like space. So dark, mysterious, beautiful, empty.

I liked where this was going, but what occurred to me is that games have stolen space’s thunder. It’s still amazing, but there are so many games in space that it feels less like a statement of wondrous emptiness, and more just a thing you do when you can’t think up a legitimate theme for your sequel.

My first mental attempt at adding a feeling of loneliness was somehow make it multiplayer. But that didn’t capture the feeling of being alone; if anything, it was the opposite. No, to be alone meant being cut off from everyone around you, not interacting with them.

That’s about when inspiration hit. If you truly want someone to feel alone, remind them of everyone else who isn’t there. Give them something that they will be drawn to that will remind them that they are hopelessly disconnected.

Forgotten Memories

The idea for my game–the story or plot, if you want to use that term–is that you enter an area of empty nothingness, with the only thing to be seen around you are a small collection of lonely sparks. They are quiet and unresponsive. You can not interact with them; you can only observe them.

Every one of these blips in this empty realm have been left here. Left behind. They are all that remains of those who have visited this place before. Memories, if you will. Nameless, wordless memories of those who are long gone.

But most important of all: Every one of these memories are left behind by actual people. People like you.

None of them have been hand crafted by a developer to represent “pretend” people. When someone visits the realm–when you visit the realm–your actions create a new memory, and when you leave, it is left behind, like a message in a bottle that will never be answered.

This is what it means to be alone.

So… Is This A Game? Or Art?

I still haven’t stopped asking myself that one, honestly.

I was trying to think outside the box. I didn’t want to just make a platformer, RPG, or something predictable. I wanted to make something memorable. Something that was different, inspiring, and unique. I would like to think I succeeded on that part.

The problem though is it’s hard to call this a game in the traditional sense. It’s not like you’re running around with a health bar, save files, a set goal, and a time limit. With so many traditional elements abandoned, can it still be called a game?

The mindset I have been in is that games are “Interactive Experiences.” Forgotten Memories has been designed with that idea in mind. In the end, it strikes me as being an attempt at “Games as Art.” if such creations are games, art, or both, well… I think that’s a debate that reaches far beyond my contribution.

It is pretty though, whatever it is. Yay shiny things!

The Technical Stuff

I should probably mention that depending on what you think about these sort of things, you might want to not read the rest of this journal. Why?

Well, for one, if you truly think this is something beautiful, and thing that knowing how it works would ruin it, the rest of this post is where I take this beautiful thing from you and dissect it, like an immature highschool-er violently stabbing the corpse of a once-beautiful bird, now bloody mess.

Also, it’s a bunch of technical boring shit.

The technologies in play here are WebGL, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, and a bit of Ajax and HTML. The last thing I ever touched anything web related was back in the days where everyone had Midi music playing the background, there were a grand total of maybe 50 gif images on the entire internet, and all sites were always “Under Construction.” Needless to say, a lot of what I did was actually pretty basic stuff, but just combined in a way that looks complicated. (Unless it actually IS complicated and I don’t realize it, in which case I should add that programming in general has been a hobby of mine since about the age of 10 or so.)

WebGL and Javascript make the bulk of the application. It handles accepting mouse and keyboard input, as well as plugging information into formulas to make those strange memory things.

Those, by the way, are known more formally in the math world as “Strange Attractors.” I REALLY wanted to add more variation to them, but not knowing a whole lot about the math behind it, I could only get one formula to work. Thankfully one of the interesting thing about strange attractors is that you can feed them various numbers to get visually different results, so it wasn’t too terrible. Maybe if I expand on the project sometime I’ll work on finding more.

PHP, Ajax, and MySQL handle the sending and receiving of data from people that connect. Yes, the memories ARE legitimately formed based on what people do. Sadly though, because of time restrictions, it’s not based as directly as I had envisioned. I wanted it to be meaningful: people who stay a long time make bigger memories, people who move around a lot make more chaotic ones. But even though I got code in that measures how much you rotate, how much you press buttons on the keyboard, how long you hold those buttons, and how long you stick around, the only data that gets plugged into the formula is how much you rotate the mouse.

Really though, that worked to my advantage, as apparently quite a few people don’t move with the keyboard anyway. Looking at my database shows that a third or so of the people who connect never touch the keyboard, which may be because you can move using the mouse buttons. I didn’t realize that was a feature of the library I was using, so the data-grabbing code doesn’t account for it.

Of course, the code is available at the link above, so if you really want to know the ins and outs, feel free to poke around!

Final Thoughts (And Some Advice)

Don’t ever try learning a new technology or language for one of these things unless absolutely necessary, let alone several. It’s suicide. I may have had success with it this time around, but I owe that in large part to having been exceptionally lucky. This should have never worked. That it does baffles me.

Likewise, prepare for these things. Consider everything that you might do, and have it ready to go. If you think you might use an art tool, download it ahead of time and learn it. If you’re going to make something multiplayer, make sure you have a server ready to go. I lost an hour or two in downloading, installing, and configuring Linux on a virtual box so that I would have somewhere to host this thing.

Finally, do something simple. If there is one thing that I can try to claim was a brilliant idea, it was that what I was trying to do–besides a lack of knowledge of the technologies–was ultimately rather simple. The more features you try to add, the better chance you have of running out of time. Think small, and build from there if you have more time left over.

In closing, I had a lot of fun, but ultimately was disappointed that I didn’t have time to add a kitten to my game.

Woo! And that was LD22! This was the first time I did the Jam purposefully rather than just using it as a time extension for the contest, and it turned out great. Having an artist to work with was a real privilege.

It’s an iPhone game, so I can’t really upload a binary. What I’m going to do is submit it to Apple later tonight and post a video of the gameplay.

Check out the video! (sorry the first few seconds are messed up). If it’s not clear from the video you control the dinosaur indirectly by sliding the platforms up and down.

As soon as the app is approved by Apple, I’ll put up a link to the app store and so everyone can play and comment on it. I’ll keep the app free for the duration of the judging and feedback time, I might release a post-compo version later.

Anyways! This was a lot of fun and I think this is my most polished LD entry yet.

Link to the Entry Page (I will add the App Store link here when apple approves it)

UPDATE 11:45pm – Submitted to App Store! Will update when available. Email me if you would like to try a build early thru TestFlight.

Wow, that was three days of hard work, but the results are pretty awesome, even if we do say so ourselves. I think Gijs’ artwork is top-notch, and I feel that we’ve managed to deliver a polished and fun game. Give it a try, please rate it and let us know what you think!

Submission Page

Alone with... things!

What went badly:

• I didn’t have any basecode and started from scratch. Thus a considerable amount of time was “wasted” on animation, landscape tiling and collision detection coding.
• Any form of storytelling or player guidance fell victim to the time limit
• The LD started at 3am here in Germany. I only got 4 hours sleep prior to the start and got unconcentrated and tired rather quickly.

What went well:

• Coding went smooth like butter. I never really used XNA previously, but working with it is easy as long as you know the coding language well enough.
• I’m not much of an artist, but i’m happy with the art. Nothing fancy, but it works.
• Using bitmaps with 256 indexed colors for levels. You won’t need a level editor this way and adjustments can easily be made. XNA doesn’t support those, but the BMP format for color-indexed bitmaps is VERY easy to load directly from data.
• The game idea turned out to be interesting and fun. Combining a traditional gametype with some unconventional twist in gameplay seems like a good way to go.

Tips and learned lessons:

• Sleep and eat well before and during the competion. You won’t be very creative or focussed when tired.
• Use a coding language and tools you are very familiar with.
• Use base code for animations and stuff. If you don’t have any participate in the warmup to create some base code for such things.
• Priorize planned features and keep the unessential untouched until you are done with the essential ones.
• Look at the themes during theme voting and try to come up with ideas for as many as possible. It helps to bring your creativity up to pace, even if a theme gets voted for which you haven’t got an idea yet.
• A drawing tablet (even a cheap one) helps A LOT with making art, even if you aren’t much of an artist and not good at drawing on paper. Take time to configure it and its buttons well for a smooth workflow prior to the contest.

Timelapse:

Tags: alone, post-mortem, timelapse

After sleeping like a baby, I’m gonna go out and relax today, I’ll upload my timelapse video later (with commentary) and write a postmortem and an article too. Try my game Desperate4luv and rate it please, it’s a dating simulator!  I had to leave a lot of stuff out, but it’s playable.

• Bugs didn’t happen. It was sort of magical. I never spent more than 10 minutes correcting any bug, and there’s no crashes I’ve discovered in the Mac version.
• I had adequate time to create assets. Most of Sunday, actually.
• My game concept is original.
• My timelapse was good!
• I did some serious bloggin’.

• The game concept isn’t quite as fun as I’d imagined. I still like it though.
• The code is by far the worst code I’ve ever written. Yes, worse than both previous Ludum Dares I’ve done.
• The music doesn’t last very long. A longer loop would be good.

In the end I spent too much time researching possible engines and didn’t get anything finished. A lot of time was wasted trying to figure out how to make Slick2d work in an applet. But really I didn’t have a game to applet…ize.

Game Name: Kitten Alone

Language: Java

Libraries: LWJGL, Slick2d, MarteEngine

Completion: 10%

I ran out of time leading up to the event to do the kind of self-education that would have made this possible. My current plan is to continue working on the game (and changing the title…) so next event I’ll have a better idea what I’m doing. And if for some reason my Java skills aren’t up to snuff by the next Jam, I may need to make the next entry in Basic. Or ActionScript 2.

Tags: fail, lessons learned, post-compo, post-mortem

If the jam lasted one more day!

Alas WHAT IS THIS DUNGEON DAN YOU SPEAK OF?

well I was off skiing all weekend with no internet so I didn’t get to post about this at all, but HERE IS MY JAM GAME
(naming this post has me already missing all the bad puns and alliterations I usually title my posts all along LD)

DUNGEON DAN

There’s only one level (as explained on the entry page) but I still find it to be a lot of fun personally.

PLAY DUNGEON DAN: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1548

And if the game seems really familiar that’s because you might have played my LD16 game, TOWER QUEST (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/12/13/tower-quest-almost-done/) which this is basically a revamp of but with less levels.

So yeah! Happy LD everyone!

I’ll write up a Post-mortem later tonight

Play windows

We got a long way, but work/school/other things got in the way a bit. However we will submit what we have made as a tech demo. Basic movement and environment are in the game. The game was going to be story based, but we didn’t have time to actually make the level and implement the story progression (even though it wasn’t that complex).

It was fun though!

Tools used:

• C++
• Clanlib
• Boost serialization
• Visual studio 2010 express
• Photoshop
• GIMP (Photoshop can’t export transparent png’s somehow)
• Pen and paper

Emiel

See by yourself!

Ludum Dare #22 – Progress report 4

I AM STRESSED RIGHT NOW.

Currently hunting for last minutes changes prior to submitting our Jam entry. Keep yourself occupied with these screen shots until then:

See more

Our 13-year-old dog had to be put down today, so my heart isn’t into finishing my LD jam entry.

Entry postmortem tomorrow.

This was my first ludum dare entry! It wasn’t actually too much of a wild ride, though– I was taking it pretty easy. More below.

The Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8771

Neutral things:

• Started working on the game at 1pm on Saturday
• Finished work at 10:30pm on Sunday
• 6 code files (Bullet, Enemy, GameLogic, Player, BGScrolling, Animation) – 7 hours 15 minutes
• 12 art assets (two frames each up / down / middle for player, bullet, three frames of asteroid, two background layers) – 3 hours 40 minutes
• 2 sound effects (shot, explosion) – 5 minutes
• Background music – 25 minutes
• Tools used: (Unity, Photoshop, BFXR, Cubase)

• I didn’t make it into the competition. I was relaxed about the timeline, started late, etc. and missed the turn-in time
• Did not get in the level of visual polish that I would have liked. (missing particles on explosions, more frames in animations)

• Completed in 15 working hours
• Finished and submitted the game!
• Game was able to be completed because of proper scoping and planning activities
• I spent probably 3 hours (a fifth of the dev time!) planning — after this I had a really good idea about when I needed to stop working on something and move on
• I thought about my game holistically and thought of the overall completeness and what features were required to get there.
• Diligence pays off! Everywhere where I acted in a precise manner I was successful
• I FINISHED AND SUBMITTED THE GAME! 😉

• More of the same! Plan, scope, then act–
• Practice the things that take the most time or that are the weakest in quality outside of compotime — Practice makes perfect! (or at least better) ;P
• With a faster process I would explore more level-design driven development — maybe even some story 😉

My first submission to Ludum Dare! It’s been fun and I hope you enjoy playing my little game!

The game itself is very simple, take your key from the top of the map to the bottom and placing it into the portal by digging your way downwards, avoid the blocks that can’t be dug (red and orange). Oh and the theme; Alone, well you are alone in the game with only yourself to beat!

Play Right Here

Instructions:

Use the WASD to move your character.

Use the mouse to remove blocks, but you are limited to a range around your character I.E. You can’t dig miles away from your man, so keep him close

It’s the day after, I am extremely well rested – slept for 11 hours after coding for over 25 hours straight! – and my game is getting some plays. I can’t wait to dig into the other contest entries, there is a ton of them and I hope everyone gets a fair chance despite the participation of certain gaming celebrities and their ravenous, crazy fanbase. But I digress – good job to all of you LD’ers! I had an insane amount of fun and I can’t wait to do it again in April.

Here’s my little post mortem of my entry, The Sheep & The Peach.

What Went Right

I released. I’m amazed and proud of the fact that I was actually able to make and release a game in about 39 awake hours. I don’t really care how well my game does, if nothing else I’m happy that I released.

My intention of creating a depressing little 10 minutes seems to have worked, players care about the characters and the correct emotions are conveyed. It’s hard to make games like that! This is by far my most “artsy” game I’ve ever made, so I wasn’t sure if it would have the intended effect.

I had a plan and I stuck to it. There was very little feature creep, and I cut out planned content early enough that it didn’t cause me problems. I also had to cut out very little as well, and the level I cut out I knew was going to be the most difficult one since it required a lot more 3D art to it.

While I keep saying time and time again that I’m no artist, I’m pretty happy with how the art style actually did turn out. A big shout-out to Halfquake: Amen for a lot of the art inspiration. Not to mention that the mouse-drawn freehand flower I made is probably the best piece of 2D art I’ll ever make in my life.

I playtested as much as I could with as wide an audience as possible. Thanks to the people in IRC who played my game when I had playable versions. I’m also thankful I had an IRL friend test for me, and even better since she’s not at all a “gamer”. She found some obvious design flaws that would cause problems for a non-gamer, that I would never have found or thought of being a gamer myself. Thanks to her I drastically cut down the explorable region to not get players totally lost, and added more refined clipping areas. But on that note…

What Went Wrong

Everyone hates invisible walls, and I unfortunately had to surround my entire game in them. If I had more time and skills I would have used physical barriers, but that just sadly was not possible. For a 48 hour game, I hope too many people don’t find it offensive. On a slightly related note, I had to drastically shrink one area of my game because it was just far larger than needed and players kept getting lost. I planned on it being a lot bigger because…

I added a big section to the game – the “explore” section – with only about 6 hours to spare. Again, my lack of artistic skills made me have to cut it down, making it far less interesting than I had hoped. My plan was to have many points of interest for the player to look at, instead of the 3 plot-specific items that made the final cut.

On Friday night / Saturday morning, I overslept by about 3 hours. I meant to wake up at 10am and didn’t get up until almost 1pm. Granted, I had work on Friday and was already running on about 20 hours being awake. But toward the end I couldn’t help but wish I had those 3 extra hours.

On that note, being at work on Friday and not being able to start until 2 hours in kind of sucked too.

I spent too much time modeling my one and only object. About 45 minutes to create and texture the house, which is literally 2 cubes and 1 extruded face. I’m no artist, but I should have spent more time in the week leading up getting more familiar with Blender. I attempted to but kept having other things get in my way.

I could have playtested it more with more people, and I could have tested things a bit thoroughly towards the end. After release I found a couple of weird, non-critical bugs. Things like objects not being the correct size and the camera snapping to a weird location during a specific condition. Nothing too terribly awful, nothing show-stopping, but still annoying to have in a release.

Finally

Once again, I had a blast, and I’m incredibly proud of being able to release. Won’t you give my game a try?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 8:08 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

What is better almost as good as making a game all by yourself, from scratch, in 48 hours? Why, receiving feedback on your creation!

So I took the time to rate a bunch of games. I tried my best to offer meaningful comments and suggestions to all the games that the “rate” button put in front of me

Here are some of the best games that I played tonight:

Courage Quest – A very well polished game, a platformer with multiple mechanically varied quests. Nice animations, graphics and sounds.

The End – A neat game with solid controls and a very spooky and well executed mood.

Alone in all Elona – While this game is not very polished at all, it deserves a mention because of its unique and very fun mechanical premise. I liked playing with it, and would play more if the author takes the time to cut the rough edges from the game.

SleepWalker – This game’s text is simply hilarious.

Void – A very, very beautiful game. Just note that the signs don’t kill you, they indicate the end of the stage 😛

See you tomorrow with more game highlights!

Tags: game reviews, rating

My submission to my first Ludum Dare is complete. I throughly enjoyed participating in the Ludum Dare.

The Submission page for the game is:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6703

Enjoy!

Well this has been my first ludum dare, and I have to say it’s been a cool but exhaustive experience.This time I’m going to write a small postmortem for my entry, Enola, which you can check out here.

What went right:

Having a clear concept for the game from the begining.  The first thing I did was write the entire (tech) document on paper. I wrote what the entire game would be about, tech aspects and limitations. This prevented me from getting lost during development.

Using a tool I already knew. I’ve been using UDK for some time, and that knowledge helped me to better decide the kind of game to develop (in conjunction with the previous item), so I didn’t find myself trying to figure out how to do anything.

Simple graphics style. The theme “alone” can mean many things to many people, but many entries agree that “mood is important.” For Enola I used simple models, only a couple of textures, and some post effects to sell the look and feel of the game (like the thick fog, the exaggerated DOF, and soft bloom).

A simple control scheme. I wanted Enola to be the kind of game that takes as much as you want to finish. There is no combat or action sequences involved (so you can’t really die in the game), and that makes the game very inclusive so (almost) anyone who can use a keyboard and mouse can play it, allowing players to play at their own pace.

Using the environment to guide the player. When you start the game the first thing you see is a glowing red orb and when you grab it, it says something like “the trees are pointing in the same direction.” This was a simple way to guide the players, so even if they get lost, they can follow the pattern of the trees to find the way. On the next level, you get a “clue” from a painting so you know it’s important, and I think these clues serve their purpose well.

What went wrong:

Not being able to work full time. Yesterday I realized I’d only worked around 23 hours on the game. That’s because I had to go out a few times, so I couldn’t work as much as I wanted. Besides I got sick on saturday, and the pills I took made me drowsy.

The game is too short. Since I couldn’t work as much as I wanted, the game is too short. The second level was planned to be twice as big. I wanted a bigger house with more to explore and do. Besides, the bigger house would have added to the “mystery effect” where the house looks very small on the outside, but way bigger on the inside (like the Diablo chapel).

Not entirely happy with the audio. I really had to rush the audio “design,” and while the audio fits the mood, and the “noise” gets higher as you reach the goal, the entire set of sound effects could improve, a lot. All sound effects were recorded by me, using my microphone.

The game is way too short. I can’t stress that enough.

No time to optimize. The game is around 100mb, and that’s after I manually removed some of the things I was sure weren’t needed (for example, why UDK includes the Mac app builder when building the installer is beyond me). It also includes some other things like Shader Model 5 materials the game shouldn’t use since I was using DX9 exclusively (or at least I suppose they aren’t needed). Pretty much finding out what the game didn’t need so the download wasn’t 100mb in size would have been a good thing.

Conclussion:

If you ask me, I’ll definitely be in the next ludum dare, but I have to find ways to ignore real life during that weekend so I can post a better game overall next time. I should also find a better way to make sound effects.

I’ve also been wondering if/how the game could be made into a full game, depending on people’s reaction, since the concept can be extended very easily, and the clues you get from the game hint a larger story.

PLAY THE FINAL VERSION

So I managed to finish a game. Not in 48 hours as intended but 72 Well, I thought that might be the case.  So I didn’t worry too much when I lost a lot of time doing the cute little character.

Can you find the kitty?

Tags: final, kitten-challenge, kitty, video, zombie

I know you all are rating and sharing games right now, but today I received what is certain to be my best XMASS gift of the year:

See pics?

Suspicious postage…

Suspicious packages…

Supremely executed ribbon curling technique…

Open… fiiirrrssst??

The gifts are great! The cats particularly like the änglaspel 😀

Thanks Swedish Santa and God Jul, everyone!

Tags: gift exchange, ldgift

my head is on fire

there are some missing features and some bugs since we were running out of time.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=6685

PLAY SPAWN

I didn’t keep very good notes while I was developing this weekend, so I’m going to try to just list out approximately what happened when before I forget too much. I’m referring to my time-lapse video to help me with the exact times.

Friday

4:00 pm – Took a short nap and then bought some groceries so I would be well rested and fed for the upcoming competition.

6:00 pm – Theme is announced! ‘Alone’.
Initially I am not too crazy about the theme. It seems a too broad. I imagine everyone just making standard platformers and dungeon crawlers and saying ‘the main character is alone’. I suppose that would happen with any theme.

6:00 – 6:45 pm – Brainstorming and sketching ideas.
Some idea fragments:

• the last leaf clinging to a tree at the start of winter
• the last chick left all alone in the nest
• a lone amoeba swimming through a vast ocean
• piloting a ship through empty space
• a dandelion spore

6:45 pm – Open Flash and TextMate and start prototyping the basic movement and gameplay

7:45 pm – Briefly consider using Flixel. Decide not to due to my unfamiliarity with it.

10:00 pm – With a rough prototype complete, I stop coding and write a quick blog post.
I spend about 30–45 minutes sketching character designs in my sketchbook.

11:00 pm Sleep!
Saturday

5:30 am – I woke up on Saturday feeling refreshed and was glad that my game concept and prototype still seemed viable after sleeping on it.

6:30 am After breakfast I immediately started working on the designs for my main amoeba character (in Illustrator).
After about an hour I had a basic design that worked so I brought it into Flash and started animating.

8:30 am – Design title screen

9:00 am – Change Nutrients from being Flash Sprites to bitmap objects that get blitted onto the background, hoping to improve performance.

10:00 am – Added the collected nutrients to the amoeba’s belly.
The game becomes pretty playable at this point. From here on I think I wasted a lot of time just playing my game.

10:30 am – Sound effects (sfxr & Sound Studio)

11:00 am – Added spawning animation.

1:30 pm – Added ‘New Species’ label

2:30 pm – Added some placeholder new creature graphics

3:00 pm – Added the menu for showing all the creatures you’ve spawned.

7:00 pm – Added background bubble graphics

8:00 pm – Remade title screen as multiple graphics instead of just one.

I was starting to feel really burned out at this point, so I wrote a quick blog post and thought I would go to bed. Instead, I spent another hour or so working on some background music (GarageBand).

Sunday

6:30 am – On Sunday I woke up feeling terrible. I was tired and my whole body was aching. I was not looking forward to spending another day in front of the computer, but I knew I only had a few more (big) things to finish.

7:00 am – The major thing remaining was to draw the graphics for all of my spawn creatures, so I got started on that first thing.
It took most of the morning.

10:45 am – Added different probabilities for which nutrients show up based on where you are in the ocean.
I took a few big missteps before I got this right.

12:00 pm – Fearing poor performance on older computers, I decided to change the game’s framerate from 60 to 30. Most of the movement in the game is framerate independent, but my amoeba animation had to be adjusted.

1:00 pm – Posted my finished game with 5 hours to spare! Woo hoo!

Ok seriously, I need synergy working with osX ppc and Arch Linux intel. It doesn’t. This swapping the usb keyboard back and forth is SERIOUSLY annoying, and since I suck at maintaining concentration, it REALLY gets bad.

later

I realized, suddenly, “Hey I tried brew instead of macports, I wonder if it has synergy and if it would work, I mean… this swapping USB keyboards every 3 minutes is REALLY bad”

It did.

IT WORKS

I AM SO HAPPY

So originally I said “I will not use a object-relational mapper.”  My reasons were:

• Overhead
• I don’t mind designing by hand, in fact, I’m fairly good at it
• I don’t have experience with any aside from django’s mapper
• I am not using django (waay too much overhead and wrong toolkit for this.)

I’d looked at the Canonical thing, I think it’s called storm, and it looked decent but in my attempted use of it a month or so ago, I hit upon lack of documentation beyond the tutorial which did not explain some basic things, like “how to get your db design to map.”  Sort of, you know, what a mapper… should do.

I do not feel that sqlalchemy is a good choice because it’s just plain too much overhead.  I don’t really need an ORM.  I need connectivity, and I’ll handle keeping the database in line. I’ve dealt far too many times with software that assumes that if you use a mapper, the database will never get corrupted. Like, you know, 100% of all java db stuff I’ve ever dealt with. In production. Costing me months of time. I hate java; too many “developers” who _can’t._  Those who _can_ develop in java never end up working anywhere near me.

Anyway so with all that background, I said “no” and was busy setting up the db by hand, and – darn it, I went and changed tools. I used to draw stuff up and build the whole design first, then publish; but no I went and was doing it bit by bit using Sequel Pro. No. Bad. It doesn’t … it works but it is NOT a design tool. It is … usable for some stuff I’ve been dealing with at work. With crap db’s designed by people who have no clue. _should have known_ but didn’t think it would be THIS bad.

MySql Workbench worked well but lately it’s just been PANTS. Meaning “Hi, I will crash now!” and such. Also they don’t do ppc. And… yeah.

So in short: I will need to probably write my own ORM type thing after this is over. What I need is a way to define the db directly, quickly, and without having breakage upon a change. And very little overhead.  I want data, put into an object, and I’ll do the push/pull when I need to.

Oh that’s right, another issue with storm was it did not explain in any way, shape, or form how to avoid the problem of persistent connections that needed to be re-attached. Like, if you went to sleep, and they timed out, how to reconnect them the next morning when you were looking at it.

Anyway not publishing this til after. Just saying, this is one of the things that went awry.

Alright, I managed to beat GM4Mac into submission and actually port my game, so now Comfort Zone can be played by my fellow Mac users.  Hurrah!  This means all of my Ludum Dare work is done.  Now, to play as many of the other 774 entries as possible!

Comfort Zone Postmortem:

The bad:

I spent most of my first night messing with movement variables, trying to bring the central gimmick of my game to life in a way that both felt “true to the idea” and fun.  I ended up with an overcomplicated mess of code that didn’t communicate anything when you played it.  Then I overslept into Saturday, and woke up feeling disheartened.  I wasted
most of the day searching for renewed inspiration.

The good:

During that search, I created a short song that really helped nail down the feel of the game for me.  I simplified the movement code and the gimmick, so that the idea was communicated consisely and powerfully. During the last 12 hours (I didn’t sleep at all during night 2 😛 )  the game design finally started to click. When I was done, my head was a mess and the game felt like a jumble, but I’m pretty certain I managed to piece everything together.  It’s short, it’s weird, but there’s something fun in there, and something interesting in there — and I consider that a success.

Sound effects:

Speaking of clicking, I did sound effects differently this time.  Originally I planned to use Bfxr (Stephen “increpare” Lavelle’s upgraded version of Sfxr), in standard LD fashion.  But then, when planning what sort of sounds were needed to communicate, I had the idea to use my laptop’s built-in microphone, instead.  Like I did when I first created Game Maker games as a kid, I would record a short, low-quality clip of something hitting something else, or scraping, or my voice.  Then I would use Sound Recorder’s basic tools to modify the clips into what I needed.  I think the results were perfect, especially for this game!

Theme:

The theme is the most important part of Ludum Dare, to me. The time-management challenge is fun, but the game-design challenge of an unusual theme is fascinating to me.  I always try to have my game mechanics inspired BY the theme, instead of creating a game and then “working the theme into it.”  Ironically, I think this can result in a game where the theme is less obvious.  This time, my thought process went thusly (minor spoilers): “Alone –> your character is alone –> aren’t game characters usually alone? –> your character ISN’T alone, but wants to be –> gameplay involves avoiding people so you can accomplish tasks”.

Graphics:

Well, I never found time to change my placeholder art into something more elaborate.  So instead, I just ran with it, and tried to turn the style into something communicative.  I think it worked out alright in the end.  It’s usually pretty effective to use base colors to represent different themes.

Music:

Probably the most “polished” part of my game, you can download the 53-second song here if you’d like: http://www.host-a.net/u/Ditocoaf/alone.mp3

Thanks for reading!

My submission is no longer bound to a zip download!

You can now click directly on the ‘web’ version, and actually get a web version! wooo!

I just found out my LD#22 submission isn’t showing up in the list or is even searchable… if anyone running Win7 wants to play a half-baked demo with no win condition, here’s the entry’s direct URL:

AL One:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8105

Play it here

This was my first ludum dare entry. I made a underwater surival game. Here is the mini post mortem:

What went right

Framework: I made some games with libGDX before, so this was a good choice for me. I used the experimental model loader extension but besides being experimental everything worked as expected.

Models: I used Blender for the modeling and texturing. All textures are created and baked in Blender. Because of my limited modelling abilities and time constraints the models are kinda low poly but this fits quite well to the overall art style. For the animations of the shark and the seaweed I used a simple wobble vertex shader. This was a huge time saver!

Sound: I recorded the sound effects with my phone or BFXR and added some slomo effects and additional bass with Audacity. This worked quite well. For the music I used some generated tunes of autotracker bottomup and exported them to midi. I imported the midi to LMMS and used a funky synth. Some additional slomo effects in Audacity resulted in the final ambient music.

Mood: FPS + Fog + Sharks +  dark ambient sound = WIN!

What went wrong

Game play: The overall game play is to simple. I got no real idea, so I just started a FPS with no real game play target. The initial primary goal was to collect stuff in a limited time constraint. This was to simple, so I added sharks to the game.

Collision detection: Spend way to much time on this one. I did something wrong with the model export. The collision center of all models had a wrong offset… The final collision detection is still kinda hacky in the final entry… :/

Overall I’m happy with the result. Good mood in the game and I learnt something along the way. See you next time!

Here’s my time-lapse of making Spawn this weekend. Total capture time was about 21 hours. Condensed to 9 minutes.

I forgot to put up my big clock for the first hour or so. I started recording at 6:45.

View the Spawn Timelapse

Tags: timelapse

We are almost there !! We are now including all the images to the game’s engine.

A demo ? Yes, here.

Game’s Engine with images.

We are about to be there !!

During the Dare weekend, I made a little adventure game engine.

In the course of doing so, I also went about making a little adventure game about a girl that just wants some peace and quiet.

Play the Web version.

Ludum Dare entry page.

This was my first Ludum Dare and I have to say it was a lot of fun. Looking back I can think of a dozen ways I could have done better, but I don’t think I would have ever seen those until I tried. Lets look back on the weekend about what went right, what went wrong, the game that came out of it, and what I feel I should do next time.

My Game:  http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8475

The Game

After the theme was revealed. I was taken a little bit. I had read over the list of possible themes and had really no thought in my mind that it would be alone. So I had to think. Above all, I wanted to really work off of the theme in a real way. I thought that would help to make the game unique and feel part of this specific Ludum Dare and not just a generic game built in a haste for a contest. I decided on caves, on flashlights, and on dim lighting. After looking at the submissions it looks like about 100 other people had those same ideas. These were things that made you feel alone. I decided that I wanted the game to be about exploration, about rewarding curiosity and trying to achieve and end goal of just making it home. A solitary experience, but one that would (hopefully) be fun.

The Good

I finished the game! Just barely, but I did finish it. So what went right?

• Setting the mood. Even with a limited tileset (and talent) I was able to pull of  consistent atmosphere through the art.
• Navigation. Leveraging the Flixel Framework the platforming of the game works well enough to be considered fun.
• @Notch’s livestream. It may seem weird, but keeping his livestream open while I worked on my own game was a constant encouragement to keep working. Plus he cranked some pretty good tunes.

The Bad

This is it? The game was finished, but can I really call it a game? So, what went wrong?

• To many features. I had to cut so many features at the end, that the game feels incomplete.
• Not familiar with tools. I had never used Pixen or Dame before this event and I spent hours struggling against them to just get my tilemap working. If I was to do it over again, I’d do much better for this fact alone.
• Forgetting about the importance of Sound. Perhaps @Notch’s livestream is to blame, but I didn’t even think about adding music/sound until there was only 90 minutes left in the contest. I tried desperately, but had to cut them to finish the game in time. Then I sat and played my submitted game in silence and wept (silently) over what I had (not) done.
• Not knowing my frameworks documentation. Confession: I haven’t made a game in 3 years. Its been that long since Ive used Flixel or programmed in AS3. It was a world of hurt trying to relearn all of that in the course of 48 hours. It came back to me, but I spent way to much time reading forum posts and searching google for options and ideals. I feel the challenge in game design should be programming the conception in your head, not strugglingly against code libraries and syntax errors.
• Sick girlfriends do not, for a good game weekend, make. My poor wonderful girlfriend came down with a horrible sinus infection on Friday. Which caused my remaining time and attention to be torn between Ludum Dare and preparing Chicken Soup and the usual rounds of Man Nursery.
• Hitting the ground running. I knew this was basically a code sprint and I laughed at those attempting their premature code optimization. Sadly, my approach was just as wrong. I through coding standards to the win as I raced valiantly towards my goal. I had a working prototype up in only an hour! To bad all that code was scrapped and the residual bits came back to haunt me in the final hours of the game.

Tips for next time

• Plan then code. My work was never efficient until I took the time to get away from the computer and write out a game plan. It takes the indecision out of the process and helps keep you focused when coding.
• Make the game work first. I spent a long time working on individual features and making sure they worked. (some didn’t even make it into the game), but I neglected to make sure the game as a whole was working. Not until the final hours did I realize I didn’t have a cohesive mechanic for playing and, importantly, beating the game.
• Stick to coding conventions and organization. As tempting as it is to just let it all go away. Some of those conventions and organization techniques take no extra time to perform and will actually help.
• Know Thy Tools. I’ve already made a personal commitment to make a full game in the span of a week, the week before the next Ludum Dare, just to make sure the code, libraries, and tools are fresh in my mind.

Bonus: Where my Time went!

I use this great tool called RescueTime for keeping metrics of my average productivity per week. As an indie developer this is great. Well, I forgot that it would be keeping track of me this weekend and I for one am happy to see its results. Here they are.

Friday

• Development : 1h 50m
• Art: 10m
• Documentation / Reference: 1h 2m

Saturday

• Development : 5h 23m
• Art : 1h 40m
• Documentation / Reference : 2h 3m
• Level  Design : 43m

Sunday

• Development : 3h 44m
• Art : 1h 31m
• Level Design : 52m

• ~ 10  hours  on coding :c
• ~ 3.2 hours on reading documentation.
• ~ 3.5 hours on art
• ~1.5  hours on Level Design.

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

Sadly I had to eject from the cockpit…

This week-end wasn’t so good for any of us at Québarium as each of us already have other plans and thing to do in our todo list.

Since it was a “Jam” we could have kind of cheated and prepare thing in advance and be more prepare (like having a project template for SDL all setup in the IDE). Since I spent time to setup first SDL 1.3 (which I grab the recent snapshots) which in the end I couldn’t get to compile properly (I was really interested to get it to work as it’s now supporting iOS).

Alas it was not to be, I though at first I will have more time yesterday as I was all “alone” (wife went out to university), but then I care thing in the house like setting up xmas decoration. Looking for iOS devs stuff for a friend that had call me in the afternoon for his own project. And today was back to work and just came back home at 18h30… and have a big headache so not in the mood to do any coding.

But I did learn new thing this time, as I got a bit more familiar with VS 2010 C++ Express Edition. Got to setup SDL 1.2 properly (will still take a look at SDL 1.3) which I will make into some kind of template for next time. Found some interesting tools, as I played a bit with Autotracker-C to get some music. And found an interesting character creation tools (http://charas-project.net/charas2/index.php). So not all time is lost 😉 and the goal was to have fun.

Hopefully next time we will organize our self a bit better (the same way we did for our participation in a fast demo compo last month, where we have less 1/2 day to build up something with the theme “potato” and hey we end being the #1 demo of that day ;-), you can see our “Poutine” demo here : http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=58079)

See you next time everyone!
And I also wish everyone Happy Holidays! Ho Ho Ho

No, really — that’s the premise of my jam entry, “Alone in the Rain”.

The world is ending. Destruction is raining down upon the world. It will all be over in four days. We all saw it coming — nobody is really all that surprised.

What is surprising is the manner in which the destruction is raining down: refrigerators? From the sky!?

There is an underground shelter that people are gathering at. Families and friends are attempting to reunite there in order to spend the final days of the Earth together.

Nobody wants to be behind. Nobody wants to be left alone..

Alone in the Rain was written in 72 hours, from scratch, in C++, using the lovely Allegro game library and the powerful Chipmunk physics library. The game has been (painstakingly) ported from OS X to Windows and Linux (don’t hold those four (4!) hours against me). cfxr was used to produce the delicious 8-bit sound effects. GIMP was used to create all of the graphics. This game features my first attempt at a human sprite and walking animation — huzzah!

There are five areas in total. The game is surprisingly challenging and unmerciful, although (in this author’s opinion) quite fun to play and experiment with. I am absolutely thrilled with the final result, and cannot wait to see what fun games everyone else has come up with!

Download Alone in the Rain

I added a screensho to media with a link to my game. IS that all I have to do?

a link to the game is below –> http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/ce8deb3d855ce51d75bf714ad1cbfd6a

I submitted my game, and finally have it a title: Lone Survivor. Link here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=7488

So, I’m going to evaluate what went right and wrong now. My wrong list is going to be waaaaay longer than my right.

– Code ideas! While making this I thought up some great ideas for code, and even separated my QuadTree code into a separate library to use in later projects. I also thought of some nicer ways to handle physics than I’ve traditionally done, which is also going to help me with some later projects.

– Development speed. Since I was using C#, the compile time was minimal, making testing a breeze. C# is also a fairly quick language to develop in.

– My interpretation of the theme. I disliked the theme chosen, it was one of the few I -1’d, but I had to work with it anyways. So I interpreted it in my own way 😛

– Absolutely everything else. Everything else was a disaster. My art was poor, and my game lacks animations because I didn’t feel like making or learning an animation library for XNA. Before I start next time I’ll make sure I do that. I also lack background music, even though I have some sound effects here and there. I was pressed on time towards the end, so I ignored adding new features and aimed to just finish the game up, because I wanted to submit something.

So all in all, I had a wonderful, gained a lot of experience, and felt the wondrous feeling of finally ‘completing’ a game. All in 72 hours. Amazing how time can fly by so fast.

I just completed my first ever game jam (not counting the 0h game jam). I’m so happy and I’m glad that I had support from my indie friends over twitter.

I just noticed that this is my first post that isn’t a draft (I have about 22 drafts currently), meaning this is the first that anyone has seen. I should probably introduce myself!

Hi, I’m Kaylin Norman, a rather spunky indie designer looking to make a name for himself. When I’m not playing video games I’m designing video games, and when I’m not designing video games, I’m learning how to design video games better. My life pretty much revolves around game design and development. My commitment to it as a career is barely straddling the line of raw passion and obsession.

I have a little thing called Asperger’s Syndrome. Its nothing big really, all it means is that I see and think differently (most of the time). I would have to say that because of my AS I’m here right now, among indie developers, creating small games. Its what got me to this point.

I don’t normally blog due to incidents that happened last time. See, if you were to meet me somewhere say, a coffee shop, you’d be quick to figure out that I’m rather shy and am also generous to the point of stupidity (“did that guy really just give $100 to the salvation army?”). I’m also very keen and love observing things, which I document…through game design!

Among game design and gaming related things I often blog about life through my eyes. Sounds arrogant I know, but bare with me here there’s a reason! My posts about life generally follow a “Cracked.com” style of satire where its almost like a humorous rant (well at least that’s the intention), and because of that people have branded me with all different types of names (that I won’t repeat).

Anywho, Thank you all for letting me join Ludum Dare. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot of things from the friends I make through this community!

Tags: introduction

This LD (like LD20) I decided to make an adventure sort of game. Not an arcade game like I usually make, but something that involves a big space to move around in.

Needless to say, I failed both times. The first time because I tried to write an efficient tile map renderer from scratch, and the second because I got caught up in making my chunked, randomly-generated map work while avoiding floating-point inaccuracies.

A randomly-generated house. I spent way too long on this.

So, after a particularly nasty bug involving the doors and still not having collision, I decided to scrap that project about 6 hours before the deadline and make a different one.

This new project, Asteroids: Alone Edition is what happens when you take the theme too literally and apply it to an old game. Simply put, it’s asteroids minus the asteroids. Well, except the main menu, where the AI plays.

I finished it up in about four or five hours, and submitted early.
…Success?

(Most of that time was spent tweaking the AI. Make sure not to ignore it when you play my game!)

Play my entry, Asteroids: Alone Edition.

Or play the original, unfinished project, Return to Solitude (Controls: WASD, hold shift to run.)

Timelapse!!!

Screens were taken every 10 seconds. Playback at 14 FPS. Made using Chronolapse.

Play/Rate my game here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=3289

Just did some minor bug fixes in the game (the game was crashing when you died, and  there was a area that the cold weather wasn’t working) and increased a little the quantity of provisions in the game making is a little bit easier (now you can actually finish it :D)

check it out here

The only readable parts are the graphics, and there's no text in them.

I don’t know how to download files off of livestream, so you can check out the slow, realtime process here:

http://www.livestream.com/rhy3756547/folder

My internet cut out a lot so there are big/small gaps between some of the videos but nothing too important should be missed. Except for the submission, which as I mentioned earlier in my post mortem, was hell. Unfortunately, since my upload speed is incredibly low the videos are in SD so there’s a lot of text missing. The StencylWorks design mode parts won’t be visible at all. Sorry.

Tags: timelapse

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&&uid=3164

http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/ce8deb3d855ce51d75bf714ad1cbfd6a my game for the game jam. Attempting to submit it, had a lot of fun rushing around to get it finished.

source code: Mediafire link http://www.mediafire.com/?on7xkcepeo5fbdo

Tags: game alone I am berky 22

Instead of programming, we went off to watch episode after episode of Johnathan Creek. I regret nothing.

I think we learned a lot, well… okay, we learned how to make arrays full of pictures of trees in Lua/Love, and now I have an entirely different and much less user-friendly version of Linux installed. Also, I learned that I completely hate Audit and hope he dies from brain cancer caused by radiation emitted from my monitor at precisely the angle of “reading code over my shoulder and making me so angry I hard reset just to spite him the stupid Gack”. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people looking at stuff I’m currently doing. I mean, who corrects their typos as they go? No-one, it’s more EFFICIENT to go through and correct typos afterwards. I may kill him in his sleep.

Tarassis

You are the pilot of the Tarassis, and have found yourself locked up in the control room.  As you find your way back to the control room, you remember the chaotic events that caused this eerie silence.  As the pilot, you have the ability to fire the ship’s local navigation thrusters, tossing around objects (and yourself!) in the meanwhile.  You’ll need to pilot the ship skillfully to get past the obstacles in your way.

We’ve had trouble with the Ludum Dare Submission Link, so we’re posting here for now.

https://github.com/jceipek/Ludum-Dare-Olin

Current Build: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IUGEEMVM

Help page coming soon here and on the Github page!

That’s it. I give up.

Since I had prior commitments on Saturday, I planned on making my entry for the Jam during the remaining 48 hours. The idea was to make a game that has NO graphics, forcing the user to navigate by sound alone. That was all going fine, and I was well on my way to a finished game, until 15 minutes before the deadline, I discovered a bug that renders the game unplayable. The way I tested it, I enabled one sound at a time and tested them individually. But, when it came time to put them all together, the way I coded it makes the whole shebang sound EXTREMELY choppy, making it impossible for the player to know what’s going on. I think I know a fix, but it’s gonna take more time than I have left. I guess I’ll keep on plugging and put out a non-jam version when I can.

A lonely boy decides to end his life and finds himself in Purgatory.

First time @ LD so I’m unsure if this is the right way to post an entry? My jam entry.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28746581/Purgatorium_LD22.zip

edit: fix for kitten crash. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28746581/Purgatorium_LD22_1.1.zip

Transdimensional Moon Rift is now finished! Thanks to the decision (well, had no choice anyway) to put it in the jam and use about twelve more hours to finish and polish I’m quite satisfied with the result.

Will you try to save your zombie kittens, ninja looted by rotten pirates?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=5242

Made in Unity  (about one meg file)

We made it! Our first Ludum Dare Jam game is here!

-> http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8069
Great! Now time to sleep!:)

So my Jam game is done.  Well, mostly done.

It lacks some of the content I desired, but I spent time on making the other 3 levels to polish the game play to what I hope is a lustering shine.

This is my first bullet-hell style shmup, so take pity on me.

Try out my game right now!

Tags: completed, easter-egg, jam, kitten-challenge

Here’s my submission.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=rate&uid=4842

What went right:

Figured out how to use Eclipse to hotswap code.
Picked a relatively easy art style.
Completed 1 level.
Made a few pieces of fun music.

What went wrong:

My weekend wasn’t free to compete in LD, wasn’t around for the first day and the second was a slow start.
Although one level was completed, I forgot to add the soap sud mechanic and the dryer cycle, so the instructions in-game didn’t make 100% sense.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7131

First Ludum Dare for me, i’ve been meaning to join in but always ended up busy during the weekend it came up…though even this weekend was no exception. (was out of town most of saturday)  Interesting experience though, I don’t think I’ve ever rushed quite this much to write anything….normally at work we’d have at least 72 hours to finish a major project

Overall I was pretty happy with the results, I’ll be honest in saying that the theme was total bunk, it’s too vague of an idea and 99% of the games in the list (mine included) are stretching it about as far as possible to make really anything work on the theme. Would be nice in the future if themes were limited to physical objects or gameplay mechanics.  /minor complaint

What Went Right?

– Time : I picked an idea that I had more than enough time to work on with my additional constraints, it was a little close at the end due to all the things I did wrong… but I didn’t really have to rush to get done (though i did have to cut back on how much artwork i did)

–Choice of api’s: I’m glad I picked SDL to use, as I’m very familiar with it, and sticking with plain old c++/SDL let me take quite a few “shortcuts” I wouldn’t have known in other languages. (bad if this were a real project, but good for saving time)

What Went Wrong?

– sound & art : I’m not COMPLETELY unskilled with sound or art, but it does take me forever. In retrospect I should have just shot for super low res and claimed it “retro” styled instead of using the higher res that I did, which, in not having time, led to a very messy, poorly drawn look

– porting: I didn’t realize that ports were allowed to happen after the deadline, so I wasted a good 4 hours of my 20 actual hours I had to work on my entry trying to get the windows port to compile properly (turned out I needed to upgrade mingw’s toolchain, mine was too out of date for the SDL build i was using)

– tools: I should have choosen tools ahead of time, i didnt even think of sound or music till I was nearly done, and at that point i spent a good hour or two of my precious dev time installing lmms, sfxr, and learning how to use them.

Also, here’s a nice set of videos of gameplay and my dev timelapse.

It was a long three nights, but here we are at last! I’m looking forward to playing all of the games made this past weekend, and I hope you all like ours. Enjoy!
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8680

This was my second LudumDare competition and my first successful one. I tried to put something together for LD21, but ultimately had over-complicated my idea and spent too much time on non-essential things. I took hard lessons away from that experience and tried to apply what I learned to this attempt.  All-in-all, I’m happy with what I was able to create and I’m pleased that I was able to finish in time.

That said, I still ran into stumbling blocks this time around. I figured this time, though, I’d publish my thoughts and maybe someone can learn something from my problems.

About Atlantic Flight One

Atlantic Flight One is a short rogue-like. As the lone survivor of the titular plane crash, you must pilot an inflatable raft towards the coastline. Scattered across islands are food, water, and fresh clothes you’ll need to survive the journey back to the mainland. If you allow exhaustion to settle in, or leave yourself exposed to the elements for too long, hunger and thirst can quickly turn into a life-threatening situation.

You can find my entry here. I invite you to check it out and I would appreciate any and all constructive feedback. And, with that, on with the postmortem.

Title Screen

What went right

Of all the things that went well, knowing the tools I used was probably the most important. I made use of C#/XNA and GIMP. Having written several games with XNA and having years of C# experience definitely paid off and allowed me to recover from what I originally felt was the end of my chances.

I also made sure – after the problems from LD21 – to pick a game that would not require complicated graphics. A rogue-like game allowed for a simple tileset with no animations. I can’t stress how much this allowed me to focus on the more important aspects of my design. And, allowed me to produce something I feel is interesting and, most importantly, fun to play.

Initially, I’d decided upon an all to complex idea, but more on that in the “wrong” section. After abandoning that, I settled on a much simpler idea. This let me recover some of the ground I lost to the first, failed idea and allowed me to end up finishing early and add in some extra features I had not originally planned.

Lastly, this weekend was fairly hectic and I ended up spending the bulk of Saturday afternoon visiting with family for the holidays. Between this, and the time wasted on my initial idea, I only had about 24 of the 48 hours – and I still had to sleep and be a dad for some of those. Carefully watching my time really paid off in allowing me to finish this time around. If I caught myself being distracted by irc chat, or the internet in general, I’d take a 5 minute breather and come back. Also, every few hours I’d make myself get up from the computer, walk around, and just think about the game. Was it going the right direction? Did I need to change anything? Or cut something? Frequently taking hard looks at my progress let me react when I needed to and feel reassured when things were going smoothly. In the end, I think I managed to get 12 to 14 hours of work in on this game. But, having those hours be focused and planned out allowed me to make each of them count.

What went wrong

I should’ve planned better – plain and simple. I did not participate in the Warmup and went into Friday evening without any ideas at all. That forced me to sit around desperately trying to come up with a game design as quickly as I could and led me to settle on a bad idea. By Saturday afternoon, I’d almost completely given up. My idea was too big, required too much in the way of art assets, and wasn’t interesting to me at all.

I spoke with a friend and he said he always felt isolated when he was on a boat in a big body of water. I instantly felt like it had some great potential to both encompass the theme and provide a challenge to players. I threw out everything I’d done up until then and started over (which felt like a really stupid decision, but thankfully paid off). After some messing around in GIMP, I settled on the graphic for the title screen. I loved it, it rekindled my spirits, and, thankfully, I quickly dove back in. Even just an hour or two spent brainstorming ahead of time, though, I feel like would’ve helped me sort out my initial idea and prevented me from having to scramble mid-way through the competition for a new idea.

Logo Concept

When I realized my original idea was too complicated and I’d essentially wasted hours of development time, I was really frustrated. I spent part of Saturday just angry at myself for not planning better, not realizing I’d designed to big (just like the previous LD), and for basically giving up. I should’ve used that energy to focus on coming up with new ideas and solving the problems in front of me, instead of just complaining and “giving up”.

Ultimately, I came up with a design and plan I was able to finish. Ironically, I finished about 2 hours before the deadline. I decided to add a few features to the design – both of which I feel really helped create a more challenging game – but, pushed my development time up to 30 minutes before the deadline. At that point, I had to scramble to get everything packaged up and ready for submission. In playing through the game today, I’ve noticed a few little things that, while not game-breaking, would’ve been very easy to spot and fix (typos, balancing issues). The next time around, I will definitely try to stop feature development sooner so that I have that time to do a little bit of polish on the game before I submit.

Lessons Learned

Plan, plan, plan. Prototype ideas, do the warm-up, and brainstorm ahead of time. You might not end up using any of the ideas you have, but at least you’ll go into the competition with some planning and scope. Even with the risk of my ideas not matching up with the theme of the competition, I think the chances of having a useful idea outweigh wasting precious development time trying to come up with a solid idea. Also, as I mentioned above, letting myself get discouraged hurt. It caused me to waste even more development time. Time, that at the end, I could’ve spent polishing my game instead of submitting it with silly mistakes.

Ultimately, I had a great time participating in this competition and I’m glad I stuck with it until the end. I’m happy with what I was able to create in 48 hours and eager to see what I can create in LD23 next year.

Lone Survivor suffering from a variety of ailments.

About Tritax

I’ve been coding for the past 27 years in a variety of languages – BASIC, C++, Java, and C#. For the past decade, I’ve worked professionally as a .NET developer creating web applications for a variety of industries. More recently, I’ve been more focused on hobby game development – releasing a small game for the Android market in October. I can be found on Twitter and Facebook

I finished my game in time for the jam. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=1044
If you thought that my last compo typing game was bad, this is a morse code game.
I’m an evil game designer… and loving it.

The only button that works is the spacebar.

Tags: C++, code, moon, morse, rover, SDL

We’ve just submitted our game!

It was our first unforgettable experience and 3 very difficult days.

But we like the result. Now we can finally relax.

And then.. We can’t wait for the next Jam!:)

Link to Jam Entry

Please rate and tell us what you think.

Thank you!

Tags: jam

It would appear that (despite my taking the extra day) I was still unable to get a game done. I use the term “done” loosely here, since I did technically finish my game. The only problem is that it consists of one good (but short) level, two bad levels, one ending which is just a pop-up text box, and one ending in which a character who has just been introduced proceeds to arbitrarily betray the player. It’s a narrative focused game, and most of the writing is not good at all.

I suppose that my not finishing the game isn’t too bad, though. This is my first game jam, after all, and I’m not necessarily going to get it right on the first try. Also, I’ve this is my first time making a narrative focused game. So in the end I didn’t get it done, but I learned a lot (okay, maybe not a lot. But at least something) and will do better next time

The only good part of the whole game

I’ve successfully completed my Jam entry, Frosthome. Guide the silhouette across platforms to shelter before he freezes to death. This was my first successful Ludum Dare, and my second LD total. I’ve learned a lot about time management and cutting features. Expect a postmortem tomorrow; for now, sleep.

Download it here

Hello, this is my postmortem for The Necropolis, the first Ludum Dare that I’ve finished not counting the mini Ludum Dare last month. Looking at some of the games here is quite overwhelming since there are a lot of great looking games considering that we only have 48 hours to make them, and I told myself that someday I’ll make great looking games but not this Ludum Dare. This Ludum Dare I’ll have to make do with crappy art, and my current programming skills. This is the result my friends.

The Theme

So in Ludum Dare we start out with a theme first(and build the mechanics from there), as opposed to making the mechanics first before pasting on the theme. The night before the Ludum Dare I looked at the round 4  list of  themes and chose parallel dimensions(since it was on the top of the list) to think about. I thought about gameplay ideas for it just in case it was chosen and then went to sleep. The next day I woke up sat down in front of my laptop, excited like a kid on a Christmas day. The theme I saw on the screen was ‘Alone” and I thought great at first until I noticed the ideas were not coming. I wanted my game’s dynamics to be reflective of the theme but when you think about it(at least from my perspective) the majority of the games out there can justify the theme of being ‘Alone’. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting ideas,it was that there were too many ideas(about 80% of them I can’t implement..yet). I spent the whole day thinking of a suitable game mechanic that I can implement and that would reflect on the theme of ‘Alone’ as best as it could, and after sleeping on it I came up with one.

The Gameplay

The first game I thought about was ‘The angel of Death’. In the game you are the angel of death sent to kill one of the baddies in the level. The idea was all the baddies in the screen with you will take damage until they die as long as you were there with them. So you had to avoid them while looking for the baddy you were sent to kill. I scrapped the idea because the screen was too large and the hero was limited in movement for a 2d platformer to avoid the baddies.

So I came up with the current game after more thinking. I came up with the idea about a character refusing the idea that monster’s exist. I heard in a university lecture once that ‘your perception is your reality’ so I imagined a character trapped in an underground labyrinth with a lantern. He firmly  believe that he is alone and that the monsters he keeps seeing just beyond his lantern’s light(to limit the vision) is just his imagination. Unfortunately they might not be, and the moment he realizes that he is not alone his mind breaks down and its game over. To do this I thought of putting( inspired by an emotion engineering lecture I attended lately) the following stuff:

Blood trail(not implemented)- the monster leave a trail of blood on the floor which disappears after a few seconds so that the player knows where its been and the direction it is going.

Heart beat(not implemented)- I actually put this in the game but the sound that I got was inaudible(its still in the source folder) so I just removed it. Whenever a monster was near the heartbeat would warn the character.

Compass(not implemented)- for game play reasons purely. The compass would point to the direction of the nearest scroll to help the character.

Light(implemented)- The core mechanic. Any monster revealed by the players light will give him sanity damage.

Scrolls and portals- the goal of the game is to explore and collect this stuff(so its an exploration game).

Lurking Monster(not implemented)- something that wanders the Necropolis randomly.

So yeah I removed a lot of stuff and decided to finish with just the core mechanic. I would like to put them in the game sometime in the future( I’m learning how to program them now) . Looking at it(at least to me) the game play reflects the theme of being ‘Alone”, alone in the screen as much as possible(game wise), and believing that we are alone, and that the monsters we refuse to believe are not really there(philosophical shit to make me sound more intelligent ;p).

What went right

I decided to use Flixel, I’ve been using it for the past months and so far so good. I’ve been learning Unity and almost decided to go with the ‘alone in the island’ game (e.g. put a guy in an island , tada! he’s alone!) just so that I could test the stuff I’ve learned. Good thing I realized immediately that I can’t model stuff yet.

What went wrong

I lost a lot of time trying to implement the pathfinding for the lurker monster before scrapping it and go with the other stuff first. I was supposed to make better art too( better is something better than my art). Forgot to put kittens in my game.

Overall

As always, I’ve enjoyed this Ludum Dare and I can’t wait for the next one. I almost thought of giving up the first day but I trusted myself enough to come up with ideas with just a little help of sleep and a dose of dreaming. Thinking of other stuff to say but I’ve ran out of stuff for now, I’ll probably put up follow ups in my game journal if anyone’s interested. So there, good luck with your games and thanks for another sleepless but excellent weekend!

What went right?

• The Flashpunk framework was incredibly easy to use, and had most of the features needed. The few things that it couldn’t do I was able to live without.
• I was able to pump out the few sound effects in sfxr extremely quickly.
• The graphics came together a lot quicker than I thought. I’m not an artist by anyone’s standards, but 8×8 pixel tiles are so amazingly simple to create that I was able to keep churning them out.
• My Trigger class. Although the code was messy, and it really needed to be cleaned up, it was extremely powerful. I was able to create interesting events in XML alone.
• It was a lot of fun. This is the first time that I’ve tried something like this, and the experience was awesome. I usually find it really hard to get motivated, but being surrounded by people doing the same thing is awesome.

What went wrong?

• Simply not enough time to put in the content. After getting the graphics and code finished, I didn’t have enough time to put together a fun game. There were actually a lot of features in the game that I had ready but that I didn’t even get a chance to put into the game. For example, there were obtainable items that could be picked up off the ground.
• There were some bugs that I knew about but did not have time to fix. The major one that everybody who plays the game fully will encounter is that doors appear on the wrong layer when you come at them from the top. To fix this, closed doors need to be two separate images in two separate layers, one underneath the player and one above.
• The code was really messy. It all worked, and there aren’t too many bugs, but I would not like to maintain this code after the event – if I do continue to work on this game, I’ll be cleaning up and redesigning the code to make extending the game easier.
• I ran out of caffeine.

Well after all this I finally found out that I had an hour submission time after the end of the compo and so I thought I missed it and went for the Jam. But all is well. I rolled out my first game and managed to keep my sanity too along with not gaining more than 2 lbs from lots of mountain dew and food 😀  Now just to relax and continue on my other game.

Btw heres my entry as well as a lovely timelapse 😀
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8075

Tags: timelapse

What went right.

• I finished. That simply made all the effort worth it.
• I’m happy enough with the graphics overall.
• I had fun making and playing it.
• I had healthy food, that made me have good mood.

What went wrong.

• I allocated too little time for level design, and it shows.
• I had to cut some features planed.
• I overslept.
• I procrastinated to much.

Conclusions.

The experience has been great and I’m somewhat proud of the result.

Timelapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77C0O9OYyFk

Tags: compo, postmortem, timelapse

Jeez, that was close! My game, Lonely God Dude, is now finished!!! 😀

Here is a screenshot of Lonely God Dude a mere eight seconds into the game.

If you would like to give it a shot, hit up this link.

EDIT: Post mortem coming up in the next 24 hours or so.

Wow.

This last day has been REALLY hard…

There is still a lot of little things I would like to change, and the alternate ending we wanted is not in this version, but at least we did complete a full version in time.
Those little corrections will have to wait though: can’t do any more tonight.

Thanks to everyone who commented, tested, and followed us during the jam.
Thanks to the Ludum Dare team and participants, it was a really great adventure…
Thanks to Motion-Twin for inviting us to its IRL gathering: Deepnight, Warp, Bumdum, and of course Eole 😉

I won’t hesitate to say “I’m in” for the next one!

Here is the link to the latest version of our game:
http://01101101.fr/ld48/demo/

End at last !! We finish our game and you can check it out here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7149

Thank you very much Ludum Dare and everybody that worked all this days !! Can’t wait to play all of them!!

Merry Christmas !!

I only have a couple of rates and I really need some more people to rate it! Thanks and heres some. Rate mine and Ill rate yours guaranteed! pics! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4335

We made it to the end together, my disgusting friend.

That Ludum Dare high really wears off during the final few hours…

Awesome LD, even if I wasn’t a fan of the theme. Even though testing out a new library usually ends in disaster during an LD I had a pretty easy time of it with Flixel. Feeling good, big scope, lost a lot of time to real life things, and still pulled something out that I’m proud of.

I’ll toss a post-mortem and timelapse up here tomorrow. I don’t know how you folks manage to think clearly enough at the end of the competition to do any sort of critical reflection.

A hearty congrats to everyone else who, like me, unexpectedly added 24 hours to their LD.

Play Me

Well, we finished! It was a blast. Don’t have a whole lot of time at the moment, but we will def have time lapse vidoes up soon.
Good luck to everyone who entered!

Well we managed to get something playable but leaving submission till the last minute leaves you with rage at the submission system.

I’m not entirely sure what went wrong with the system but It would log me out whenever I clicked on the Create an Entry it would sign me out, and then it would tell me i needed to be signed in.

Anyway here is a link to the current version of the game if anyone is willing to play it application. I will release the final version of the game with source in a couple of days when all of the bugs are sorted out and some content is made.

Windows Executable

This is an effort of about 40+ hours total(I had party to go too and Mirage and I work at the same place so we had work as well).

We got MisitfChris to make sounds and Music but we could not get them in. But we will be making an update if that’s allowed.

We had to cut back and a lot of assets went without use.

The game ends pretty quickly but I think we got the point across.

Things that went right:

– Programming using Love2D was fun!

– Consistent Art Style

– Cooperation(Google+ Hangout was extremely helpful! The ability to look at each others screen on the fly helped.)

-Awesome Music (Look forward for the update.)

-Playing with the yarn ball is fun!

Things that went wrong:

-We lost our $6000 dollar Cheetos budget!

-We had to cut our game practically in half because of time constraints.

This was our first time participating and we had a blast! We are in for the next one!

Go play it and tell us what you think!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8306

Tags: alone, jam, kitty

Another Ludum Dare has come and gone and now that the high is over, it’s time to brag about the things I got right and lament about the perils of doing things wrong.

First, the right:

To start, I’ve had a streak recently of using words within established genres.  The last LD I submitted had you turn objects into words to fix the scene and advance to the next part of the game.

With “The Unfortunate State of Being Alone” I wanted to be able to tell more of a story than the last time I used words.  I was also influenced by the poem “Lost Generation” by Jonathan Reed [Poem].  It is a poem that has a different meaning it does when read forward than it does when read backward.

So, with that, I set out to write a poem that dealt with loneliness, but could also read as the dying words of someone who believes we die alone.. and the dying words of someone who believes that you are never alone, even in death.

everyone dies alone
i cannot believe that
when your lips touch mine
i can be with you forever
i tell you knowing that
i want to live without you by my side
i’ve never felt that
all these years meant something
and with my last breath i know
it was foolish to presume that
i will not die alone

i will not die alone
it was foolish to presume that
and with my last breath i know
all these years meant something
i’ve never felt that
i want to live without you by my side
i tell you  knowing that
i can be with your forever
when your lips touch mine
i cannot believe that
everyone dies alone

So, with that finished, it was time to write up some puzzles around specific words in each line.

I picked a word from each line that would be the easiest to write some back story around.  And then I would associate each story with some item you would interact with in that particular room.  Each story would have a theme and use specific words to hint at what the missing word from the line is.

Now, the bad:

So, as with all Ludum Dare, once I had done all the above work.. I had to start cutting out superfluous parts.  I had wanted to do a bit more with this poem.  The game, as it is right now, doesn’t take advantage of the fact that the poem is read the same forward and backward.

The original thought was to give you the option of the gold key or the red key first.  Depending on which key you chose, it would change which direction the poem was completed, which would change the ending.

Also, how to solve the puzzle changed shortly after I completed the first puzzles of Ashley’s room.  So, the red puzzle is .. very difficult because it lacks the story-based clues like the other rooms have.  Also, because these puzzles were rushed, they are not as fantastic as I would like them to be.  In a perfect world, there would have been more objects in the room and more puzzles within each room (you can see a bit of this with the hidden safe and the service elevator).

That’s all for now!

It’s done!! If you are running Linux, go ahead and play. As for the other platforms..

Two and a half hours after the jam has ended, and I’m still trying to get my game working on the three Big Ones. Ungh — it’s painful. I’m using C++ with Allegro and Chipmunk.

Linux: Done. Not too bad. I didn’t have a statically linked copy of Allegro, so I’m including the Allegro shared lib, hackishly setting  LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and relying on users to run a “run_game.sh” script that sets the env var and runs the game. Does anyone know how to nicely distribute a game that relies on a shared lib?

OS X: More or less done. Figuring out how to package things into a .app was painful. THEN figuring out how to put the .app inside of a .dmg was even more “fun” (thanks though, guys). The other fun news is that Allegro relies on QuickDraw, an older OS X API for doing software rendering. It was deprecated (but functional) in Snow Leopard, but trying to run it on a Lion machine reveals that support was dropped entirely. So, on Lion machines, the game will toss a bus error when run in fullscreen. *grumblegrumble* Fine then. Since I can’t even catch the failure gracefully, Mac users will have to settle for a windowed version.

Windows: About to start on it, but I suspect it will be more of the same awful. I didn’t see any nice binaries for Chipmunk lying around, so I suspect I’ll need to compile that myself using some arcane MinGW IDE like Dev-C++ or Code::Blocks.

Next year I’m either going to use Java, or invest some time making a set of scripts to automate at least some of these cross-platform chores.

I’ve written a post-mortem for my entry, Separation Anxiety.

It’s very long and contains spoilers for my game, so I’ve hosted it on my own website instead of simply writing it here.

You can find it here. I hope you enjoy!

17,530 Screen shots and 48 hours compressed into this 6 minute long video. Its also got a rocking soundtrack. I can’t wait till thenext Ludum Dare!

My Game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8475

Tags: timelapse

A post mortem for Luto Hominus.

Well, I didn’t exactly finish in time, did I? But I submitted the unfinished game anyway. I think it was definitely a learning experience for me- though this isn’t the first time I’ve participated in Ludum Dare, it’s definitely the farthest I’ve gotten.

When the theme ‘alone’ was announced, I was rather disappointed. I had really wanted to participate, but no ideas immediately sprang to mind. So I spent the next few hours taking walks and talking to people on the IRC. Eventually, I got the idea of a sokoban clone where you had to push blocks of fuel into some kind of alchemizer that would turn them into a friend for you. _frog on #tigirc suggested that I make the blocks of fuel blocks of clay and the alchemizer a kiln, and I got started.

I set up a basic world with grid-based movement, a block to push around, and a kiln as a goal. However, at that point, I realized that I wasn’t any good at puzzle design, so I binned the idea of a sokoban clone and kept working. Eventually, a new idea dawned: A roguelike game where you had to fight off The Loneliness (that spectre you see at the top) while moving the block towards the kiln.

Unfortunately, I ran into some complications. Work got in the way of making the game- this weekend was probably the busiest, work-wise, I’ve had in the past month. I didn’t prioritize properly: I spent way too long working on the minimap and level generation (there are 75 possible rooms!), rather than working on game-centric stuff (there’s not even a menu or a win condition, or a lose condition.) My vision wasn’t clear enough- I didn’t have a good idea in my head, I was making it up as I went along. I just wasn’t organized enough.

But what I did do, I’m proud of. I made a partial game faster than I ever have before. I learned more about procedural generation, stuff that I can apply to my main game project. And, most importantly, I had fun- it was great hanging out in the IRC, looking at the stuff other people were doing, frantically coding, idea jamming, etc.

Thanks for the great time, guys. Looking forward to seeing you all again come LD #23! Happy holidays and an awesome new year, everyone.

It took a few tries in Motion to upload to YouTube properly, but without further ado, here’s my timelapse for the creation of The Travel Section, with a postmortem after the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhNemclQU7s

So, what went right:

• Sticking to UIKit was a great idea, as it let me visually design my interface and make sure it was going to come out right on the first try.
• SpriteSomething on iPad was super-useful for making pixel art.

And of course, what went wrong:

• I totally misused UIStoryboard in my first pass of the app. If I had done just a touch more reading before I started, I wouldn’t have lost five or so hours near the end of the compo.
• CoreAnimation isn’t for games. I had four or five hours to make my minigames near the end, and if I had stuck to basic NSTimer and manual animation at the start, I probably could have done three or four of them in the time it took me to do just one on the second try.

So, that was my Ludum Dare 22! It was a tough experience, taught me a lot, and was quite a bit of fun. Hope you enjoy the game, if you happen to put it on your iPhone/iPod!

!! VICTOLY !!

I personally consider it a victory to have completed a game at all for my first Ludum Dare, much less one that’s actually kind of charming. So without further ado, let’s have ourselves a post-mortem!

(-o^_^)-o PLAY AND RATE THE HUG MONSTER HERE o-(^_^o-)

The Good

The Concept:  Thankfully the idea for this game came quickly, but it was not the first idea I had.  I threw out two other concepts before settling on the Hug Monster.

The first idea was a game where you’re a zombie who just wants to make friends because he’s lonely, but invariably when he makes a new friend he eats them.  While I liked the idea for its humor value, I wasn’t convinced that the gameplay would be much fun… or rather that I wasn’t sure I had the time to make it fun.

The second idea was one in which you play a shoplifter who tries to steal as much as he can from a store while avoiding the watchful eyes of the clerks.  While it fit the theme, I didn’t really have any great ideas on how to turn it into a fun game.

That’s when the Hug Monster came running through my head.  I figured that most people would choose to make their games about avoiding the state of being alone, so I would flip this on its head and make the game about becoming alone to seek safety.  I find the particular emoticon that the hug monster is made of to be really cute and compelling, and I liked the thought of it wiggling its arms as it chases you around.  I thought that if I stuck with the ideation that I might come up with a better concept, but an hour and a half had passed already and this game concept seemed just viable enough to have a shot.  This turned out to be a great plan.  The idea was solid and the execution was just as cute as I’d hoped it would be.

Unity3D:  I’ve been a fan of the Unity tool for almost a year now, and this game proved that it is sufficiently versatile to handle both 3D games as well as 2D games on a short timeframe.  I still believe that Unity, being a 3D engine is primarily best at rendering 3D.  There are certain idioms and assumptions that Unity uses which make perfect sense in a 3D world, but which sometimes get in the way when you’re thinking in 2D space.  That said, Unity does offer you the ability to “break out into the 3rd dimension” if you want to with ease.   Top it off with a nice, sane language like C# and you have a real winner of a tool.

The Art Style : I’m not saying it’s perfect.  There’s a lot I want to clean up in the graphics for Hug Monster, and it’s certainly not on the level of some of the incredibly beautiful entries I’ve seen from others such as morganquirk, but it works to reinforce the lighthearted feel I was going for when I concepted the idea.  I don’t think a “realistic” or even a “cartoonish”  Hug Monster would have nearly the same charm, and a protagonist with any detail might take away from the real star of the show, the monster itself!

Wingdings : No kidding, the Wingdings font saved the day here.  The character’s standing pose is actually an 8px sized rendering of the skull and crossbones icon with no aliasing.  Now that I’ve told you this, you can probably see it if you look at the main character hard enough.  Of course, at the 8px scale, it looks more like a daring little guy… one who is very easy to animate, as it turns out!

ALL OF YOU GUYS : I don’t want to sound cliche, or like the end credits screen of an old Nintendo game, but the Ludum Dare blog itself was a huge inspiration and a motivating force to help keep me focused.  Just knowing that there were dozens of other people doing this at the same time helped keep my head in the game, and if I had a moment to breathe I could look at the progress other people were making as well.  I even played a demo or two along the way.  Additionally, posting my own progress got me some nice feedback from the community regarding what I could do to improve the game.  I wish I’d had more of this actually!

The Ending Rocks : Even though the ending took about 3 hours to make, with all the precise fiddling I did to make everything timed just right, I think it’s worthwhile.  I would love to add more movie sequences at various mid points in the game as I expand it over time.

The Bad

Sound Design was a big time suck :  I have no experience designing sound.  None.  Why I thought it would be a great idea to hang out on a sound generator website and try to make sfx and music for this game I have no clue.  I’m sure I wasted at least 3 hours playing with sound effects that didn’t really work, and that I didn’t even quite know how to form into what I wanted in the first place.  I could have used that time to better balance my level design, or give people clues about the properties of the game world (for instance, make some levels where Hug Monster plows through blocks early, just to show you that it can, before you find a level in which it actually needs to happen.

Level Design was a big time suck :  And I still didn’t fully express all the ideas I wanted to.  I was hoping to have more novel behaviors for switches, such as opening pitfalls or dumping rocks down to block passages.  I was also hoping to have more environmental hazards, such as falling Wingdings, and possibly motorized platforms.  Even what I have really isn’t perfect.  When the game started coming together I knew it was begging to be a puzzle solver, but the problem with this is that the puzzles need to be challenging and at the same time actually solvable… and with the Hug Monster’s AI being a bit on the dumb side, that wasn’t so easy to accomodate.

Hug Monster’s AI : It’s not that the AI is really “bad” but it’s very simple, and I feel its lack of smarts is somewhat of a hinderance to game and level design.

Unity3D : Or rather, the physics engine in particular.  It wasn’t all bad by any means (after all, it’s prominently listed as one of the good things) but I found that while it bought me a lot of time for other things in not having to roll my own full physics engine, I still lost some time fiddling with Unity’s built-in physics which can seem somewhat opaque.  I’m sure this will come more naturally in time.

I’m sure there’s more to be said about the game’s good and bad points, but right now I’m just spent.  I think I’ll go rate some more of you guys’ work!

Tags: postmortem

What was changed:

Nothing.

Except music doesn’t stops after your first move (you can disable music from menu – Escape, M).

Link: http://db.tt/lJQCjhry

My entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=8581

Windows users with Java installed can also play Java version (just click on the “Linux” or “OS/X” link, save and run with double click) . Actually, this Java port is recommended for all, because original dotNet version sometimes crashes at start.

For those who hate my game for its difficulty:

I’ve prepared version with reduced difficulty.

Changes:

– energy doesn’t decreases while walking

– drill discharges more slowly

– quakes are not so frequent and powerful

– aliens won’t hit so hard

– scream hits you only when walking, not while drilling

Link to download easy version: http://db.tt/lFszdbli

I just finished my first Ludum Dare, and it was a success! Admittedly I didn’t finish in time for the compo and my game’s still not totally done, but I’m still proud of what I did.

The Game

The gameplay of Busy King is something like Pacman, but a bit more strategic (for example, you can hide in other rooms, and you should probably avoid the wizard.) You play as a king who needs some alone time to get some work done, but his subjects keep seeking him out to ask him stuff. The only way to get rid of them is to bring them back to the room they came from.

If anyone is wondering what the characters are supposed to be: the pages (red) belong in the dining room, the advisors (green) belong in council chamber, the knights (blue) belong in the armory, and the wizard (purple) belongs in his tower. I would have added more characters (including kittens!) if I had more time.

The bad

Too many other things to do! All Saturday night was spent on a bus, and almost all Sunday was spent with my relatives. So it was not a good weekend for Ludum Dare – but I was able to get the game playable on Monday. There are still some weird bugs though (I like the one where a subject suddenly is able to walk through walls and escapes the castle.)

I also wish I had done the instructions differently. I wanted to be in the cool club and use integrated instructions but it didn’t work well, and I was out of time at that point. Since the instructions are simple, a single splash screen might have been better.

The good

The game turned out fun! The concept evolved over time: at first I was thinking of a time management game where you had to assign your subjects different jobs in order to get them out of your way (which would probably not be practical for Ludum Dare), but after discussing the idea with friends I ended up with this. (By the way, the king idea came from watching Merlin just before starting…)

I’m happy with the graphics too, and I think that using a scroll for the meter was a good idea.

I’m looking forward to the next Ludum Dare, when I can hopefully devote more of my weekend to it! In the meantime, I probably try to finish Busy King, especially if people think it’s fun.

Play and rate here

Tags: postmortem

What went right:

Pretty happy with everything, planned it out,worked fast and smart, had enough time for everything but 1 or 2 minor things

What went wrong:

Using polycode and finding out it’s lua bindings had all sorts of issues

And then trying to build polycode from source myself and wasting an entire day on that

(Did I do this right? Hello??)

If you were trying to play my game in the past few days and were met with “Could not find main class alonegame.AloneGame”, please upgrade Java to version 7.

Tags: java

[ Play the game ]

I’d call this one a success!

Good:

• Game is finished, with a lot of content (for me): five playable characters, three spells, three bosses with different behaviors, an upgrade system!
• I was dedicated. I slept about 3 hours per night and spent almost every waking hour on the game.
• Game runs (relatively) smoothly. Given how little I optimized, and how many graphical tricks I used, I think 20-30fps is pretty good.
• I’m getting the hang of Javascript.
• HTML5 canvas turned out to have a lot of relevant useful features
• Really pleased with how the boss of level 4 turned out (and I got in a Wayne’s World reference)
• Really pleased with how the rotating gameplay area turned out
• Happy with the graphics, sound, and character design for the most part
• Deploying to web turned out to be pretty easy. I’m very happy to have my first web-based LD game

Bad:

• I get so engaged with my game during the competition that I have trouble joining the community. I’ll have to make up for it now that it’s over.
• Navigating an isometric layout is a tricky problem
• Had to leave out in-game instructions
• I wish I had more engaging gameplay, but it’s fine for what it is
• Had to leave out storyline (which is fine because it was too depressing)
• Sprites are cut way down from my original idea, surprising no one
• Had to develop in Firefox because of how Chrome handles trusted domains on local filesystems

Tags: postmortem

Chaoslab – Quick ludum photo blog of making of – The Lonely Alien.

Ludum Dare #22 - The Lonely Alien

The Album contains a few shots of the making – The Lonely Alien.

• Game Map.
• Art Asset’s
• Design Document’s
• The Lonely Alien.
• Me after the 72 hour game jam.

Hope you had as much fun as I did if not more!

Im going to bed.

We did it! Team Flare submitted 1 hour before deadline!!

For all besides of myself it was their for first Ludum Dare. Andreas catched a flew yesterdays and stayed awake all night with me to finish things up! Chapeau Andreas that was tough! Thanks to Ralf, Monica (gfx), Miriam and Hanne (sfx) for their great work! A detailed post mortem will follow soon!

Please play and vote here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=4216